A collection of speaking engagements I have delivered, interviews I have been a part of, and
publications in which I have been featured.

Startup Runway

Why is a startup’s runway the #2 most important factor in fundraising and IPO?
I present the key elements of the startup runway, how to extend it,
and what’s typical for various types of businesses. The incubator cohort and I dive into a
live model building session for a enterprise SaaS business using Runway by LTSE.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used as a new kind of ontology to transforms
information into knowledge. AI technologies like machine learning, computational linguistics and
graph analytics can be used to extract concepts from scholarly content to form a knowledge graph.
Knowledge graph can be used for exploration and inference proposal, aiding scientific discovery.
I present our learning at Yewno during the ICSTI Technical Activities Coordinating Committee (TACC)
workshop at the Library of Congress.

What Does Discovery Mean for Libraries?

Discovery tools are an important topic for academic
libraries. How useful are they to our patrons? What
priority do we give them on our websites? How do
we use them to distinguish one resource type, or
group of resources, from another? How do we
manage access across consortia without confusing
our users? And how do we keep them usable,
accessible, and maintainable? I join librarians
Sofia Slutskaya, Jonathan Bodnar, Heather Jeffcoat and Jeffrey Mortimore
to discuss what discovery mean for libraries at GLC 2017.

Next-Generation Knowledge Discovery

What are the challenges of unearthing knowledge and inferences from a massive amount of content?
Why is conceptual search backed by a knowledge graph superior to traditional keyword search?
I discover the latest approaches to improving academic search engines at SLA 2017.

Making and accepting payments using web technologies is quite cumbersome. Thankfully, the new
Payment Request API and vendors like Apple and Stripe make the implementation simple and secure.
I join Molly Dalton and Zach Koch, who work closely with Edge, Chrome and the Payment Request API.
We discuss e-commerce on desktop and and mobile, and how to use new standards for seamless payment
acceptance.

Vue.js is a JavaScript UI framework built to be approachable, versatile and performant. Its creator
Evan You and the award winning writer of CSS-Tricks Sarah Drasner join me to discuss the creation of
Vue.js, the beginner learning curve, how it handles data and animations, and how it differs from
Angular and React.

Rob Dodson, Alice Boxhall and I discuss web accessibility. We talk about why accessibility matters
to everyone, even beyond people with disabilities. We dive into the implementation details, such as
navigation, semantics and styling, based on Rob and Alice’s Web Accessibility course. We explore
various guidelines and learning resources to improve design and implementation.

Calvin French-Owen, Andy Elliott and I discuss web analytics. We talk about what business metrics to
measure and how to select analytics vendors for businesses large and small. We also discuss the
technical challenges of analytics instrumentation, such as measuring web apps vs. websites,
automation and data schema design.

Benoit Marchant, Andy Matuschak and I discuss UI components. We reminisce our extensive history of
framework-level web and native engineering at Apple. We debate various challenges and best practices
of component reusability, encapsulation, gestures, data binding, and collaboration between engineers
and designers.

Tracy Lee and I interview Shirley Wu and Nadieh Bremer, long-time members of the D3.js and data
visualization communities. We discuss Shirley and Nadieh’s latest collaboration,
DataSketches, in which they each produce a data visualization monthly,
with a common theme. We also discuss broader trends of building data visualization using web technologies.

Object-Oriented UI Programming with ECMAScript 2015

ECMAScript 2015 brought us convenient ways of building UI using object-oriented programming
techniques. I present how to architect a single-page web app with reusable components,
and how to implement it using pure HTML, CSS and JavaScript written in ECMAScript 2015,
with no vendor dependencies.

Instrumenting and Analyzing Developer Tools

Analytics data provide crucial insight into what values are delivered to the users, and how
improvements can be made going forward. Developer tools are often open-source software, and
open-source software typically do not gather analytics. Bower is a popular
open-source package manager for web projects, used by tens of thousands of designers and engineers
around the world. I discuss how we, the Bower core team, instrumented the Bower CLI tool for
analytics, built a data ETL pipeline, and visualized the data for the core team and end users
to consume.

Visualizing Bitcoin Arbitrage Opportunities

Multiple alternative currency exchanges around the world trade bitcoins with price discrepancies
of up to 10%. I discuss how to build an application to discover arbitrage opportunities,
with data visualization implemented using D3.js. The application source code is available on
GitHub.

Decorator Pattern in Python

Why is the decorator pattern a popular software design pattern? How does the Python implementation
work under the hood? I discuss my thoughts on the decorator pattern at the Twin Cities Python user group.

Delivering Complex Pricing Models in the Field

Product pricing is becoming increasingly dynamic, personalized, and immediate. This trends applies
from yogurt in grocery stories, to multi-million-dollar hardware and software solutions for
world’s largest governments. Delivering such complex pricing models require a drastic rethink of
pricing strategy, workflow and technology. I present how we implement and deliver such systems at
Entrust Datacard, and how we enabled our on-the-go sales teams to be more flexible and self-sufficient.

Achieving Product / Market Fit with an Apparel Startup

How do you go beyond sustainable apparel and build a sustainable business? I discuss the founding of
Holy Cow Company - how we grew from selling rebranded American Apparel t-shirts in our apartments,
to 60-door distribution in 3 countries and an e-commerce properties with positive return on ad spend.